CAER LÊB, YNYS MÔN

A blackbird is singing in a distant oak.
Now that the may blossom has fallen
the hawthorn is festooned with a white,
wild clematis – traveller’s joy or
old man’s beard. Hereabouts, people have
hunted, gathered, built, farmed, worshipped,
imagined – and some, undoubtedly, thieved
and murdered – in a continuing commune
for at least six thousand years and more,
longer than Babylon, longer than Rome.

It is nothing compared with the stars,
which most of them will have marvelled at,
but, nevertheless, it seems worth noting.
As well as the exactitude of books,
history is written in earth works,
standing stones, a copper coin and a mound
of periwinkle shells.

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NOTICE – I, DAVID JOHN BERNARD SELZER, hereby assert and give notice of my right under section 77 of the UK Copyright, Designs and Patented Act 1988 to be identified as the author of all works presented within this website.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS – Some of the poems on the website have appeared, in one form or another, in the following: A Jar Of Sticklebacks, Anglo-Welsh Review, Jabberwocky, Life Lines, Peterloo Anthology, Poetry in the Seventies, Poetry Matters. Poetry Merseyside, Meridian, Still Life, The Honest Ulsterman and the Times Literary Supplement. Some have been broadcast on BBC Radio Merseyside. HERRINGS was performed at Action Transport Theatre in 2005.